In recent years, telecommunication devices have advanced from offering simple voice calling services to providing users with many new features. Telecommunication devices now provide messaging services such as email, text messaging, and instant messaging; data services such as Internet browsing; media services such as storing and playing a library of favorite songs; location services; and many others. Telecommunication devices are also now equipped with cameras capable of capturing one or both of images and videos. While these new features greatly enhance the utility of the telecommunication device to its user, they also pose new problems. Images and videos captured by the telecommunication device must be backed up to prevent data loss. And software enabling the many new services offered by the telecommunication device must be updated. Both of these problems point to an increased usage of data communication through the telecommunication service provider network. Such data communication is often governed by a data plan specifying a price associated with a specific data transfer size. Frequent transfers of large files necessitated by these new telecommunication device features, then, can quickly become very expensive and also overload the service provider network.
To avoid data transfers through their telecommunication service provider network, telecommunication device users occasionally utilize wireless communication transceivers of their telecommunication devices, such as Wi-Fi or Wi-Max radios, to connect to local wireless data networks in order to transfer data over those networks. For example, homes and offices typically have wireless data networks that computing devices and telecommunication devices can connect to, the wireless data networks providing connectivity to the Internet and devices reachable over the Internet. These wireless data networks are under-utilized, however, because telecommunication devices typically are operated with their wireless communication transceivers disabled. Wireless communication transceivers consume substantial battery power when enabled, making it difficult to operate telecommunication devices with the transceivers always on. And because disabled is the typical default, users often forget to enable the wireless communication transceivers of their telecommunication devices when they come into the vicinity of a wireless data network.